Have you been sending postal mail, postcards or printed newsletters to your list? Do you have email addresses for all of those people you have a postal address for? Probably not on all of them. One of the most challenging things to do is to obtain email addresses from those who you have postal addresses for only and it's one of the most popular questions we get here at VR.
Why might you want to convert your postal list an email list? First of all print can be expensive and those on a budget reserve print for their preferred customers, special events or special sales. In some cases postal mailing can be 10x the price of an email. Production is also usually longer and you won't get the instant response you do from email.
So how do you get people to give you their email address? Here are 5 quick ways you can start!
1. Drawings - Have a monthly drawing where you highlight a winner. In your printed newsletter or on your website highlight what the winner gets. Increase the chances by having 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prizes so more people win.
2. Discontinue Print - If you are not wanting to pay the price of print, tell your recipients well in advance that if they want to continue receiving your newsletter they must go to your site to register. If your printed newsletter is monthly, you'll want to gear them up 6 months in advance. Make sure you highlight the message "4 MONTHS LEFT", "2 MONTHS LEFT", "THIS IS YOUR LAST NEWSLETTER!". Then send a postcard after for one last chance.
3. Telemarketing Campaign - Telemarketing is not a 4-letter word. If you've got phone numbers for your customers you can take a chunk of numbers each day and call your recipients. In the event that you get voicemail leave a short message:
"Hi there, this is Jane from XYZ Wines. We want to thank you for your business and we wanted to let you know that we're going to be discontinuing our printed newsletter. We're changing it to an email newsletter which will get to you faster! We'd love to have you continue to get this so you can just visit www.xyzwines.com and sign-up for the newsletter today. Again, thank you for your business."
That was 15 seconds fyi, I just timed myself.
4. Email Only Offers - It's all about give-and-get right? So why not give email-only offers to incent your recipients to switch? You can give members-only discounts, free shipping or free invitations to events. Send out a postcard driving people to your site to sign up. VerticalResponse let's you collect addresses free btw.
There you have it, 4 easy ideas on how to start converting postal addresses into email addresses.
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